Crowstep
4d ago
Eh, you can't have a forum dedicated to political discussion and complain when people hold opinions you disagree with.
I've wasted a lot of time here arguing with Holocaust deniers, until I realised that if it were possible to convince them with evidence or sound argument, then they wouldn't be Holocaust deniers. I found the block function a better solution. I suspect many others have chosen the same approach of non-engagement.
I think the moderation here is excellent. There will always be a few users who manage to get their pet issue into every topic. That's the price we pay for moderation that doesn't descend to purity spirals or 4chan-esque vulgarity.
Crowstep
30d ago
I predict more Israel Bad posts everywhere
I'm not sure it'll make a big difference. Months of civilians getting starved, displaced and blown up is quite different from a short, narrowly focused military operation targetting high-ranking members of a regime plus military/nuclear hardware. Israel's actions against Hezbollah didn't elicit much of a negative reaction.
As far as I can tell, the real core of this story is that children that were found orphaned in Russian-captured territory were put in the Russian orphanage system, which seems like a normal thing to do.
Russia could have returned them to Ukraine. Russia is happy to do extensive prisoner swaps, so why not allow innocent children to go?
Because the regime does not believe that is What Russia Should Do with Ukraine.
Crowstep
3mo ago
The idea that a Spanish surname might disqualify someone from being American is kinda funny when the Americas looked like this in 1800
The Germans and French are ethnic groups. Americans are not. You could argue that Araujo isn't Anglo-American, but then neither are African Americans and they've been there since the beginning too.
Crowstep
11mo ago
Just because he committed a crime doesn't give us carte blanche to commit the worst argument in the world.
Crowstep
21d ago
Who exactly is 'they' here?
The survivors, the soldiers who liberated the camps and the historians who studied the Holocaust afterwards are not the ones doing the censoring. Governments (and not most governments) censor Holocaust denial because they know that the only people who question the historical facts do so because they hate Jews, and hating Jews caused the Nazis to kill six million of them. We can argue whether censorship is the right approach or not, but its mere existence isn't evidence that the Holocaust was exaggerated or made up. To believe otherwise fails in the same way that all true conspiracy theories fail, it requires too much coordination from too many people over too long.
Crowstep
23d ago
Your post suggests that you're talking about yourself rather than your child, which is a relief. But I have to ask, what negatives do you forsee from getting vaccinated so much that you'd risk getting the diseases they protect against?
Crowstep
9mo ago
I think you're talking past me. The sole point I was making was that Jews are not part of the progressive stack of oppressed identities among Cultural Marxists. Whether the Jewish-Israeli lobby is particularly powerful in the US is irrelevant.
It's possible for Jews to be considered an oppressor class by these people and also have the US government be very pro-Israel, because most Democratic congressmen are not hardcore wokes, even if they do tolerate it as an ideology.
You clearly think that Jews are too influential in American politics, fine. You're not the only guy on this forum who doesn't like Jews. But your statement that they are considered part of the progressive stack with all the other intersectional identities obviously isn't true.
Crowstep
22d ago
Contracting and then passing on COVID to my older immuno-suppressed relatives, for whom the vaccine doesn't provide 100% protection. And since the way we ultimately defeated the virus was by achieving herd immunity, me getting a vaccine contributes to that, rather than free-riding as anti-vaxxers did.
Crowstep
1mo ago
And statistically she'd be more likely to divorce her partner later
That's not what the link you posted says. A woman who has slept with six men is (statistically) a safer bet than a woman who has slept with two. Although even then the effect is small. The only significant effect is for women who have slept with 0 men, which is pretty clearly a proxy for conservative religiosity. If you want that kind of woman, they're pretty easy to find, they all go to the same place on a Sunday...
Oh, and guess what, obese women won't settle for an obese man, even though the reverse isn't true.
Women on dating sites won't settle, but men apparently will? Aside from a few fetishists, men don't like fat women. This seems more of an effect of the imbalanced ratios on dating sites than actual preferences. Nobody prefers a fat partner, but beggars can't be choosers.
Women get bombarded with attention during their most attractive, fertile years, decline to settle, and as time comes on become less marriageable overall.
And yet according to surveys, both men and women are equally likely to want to marry, and women are more likely to want to marry now (as opposed to some vague time in the future).
And speaking more personally, my experience has been that the most attractive women are most likely to have boyfriends or husbands, because it's much easier for them to attract said boyfriends and husbands. Women don't actually like the modern promiscuous dating market. It's an inadequate equilibrium that benefits womanisers to the detriment of basically everyone else.
There has been a decline in partnering and marriage. The decline in partnering seems to be a consequence of atomisation, digital interaction replacing real-life interaction and perhaps excessive female pickiness due to social media. But crucially, it's not because women are sleeping around, because they're not sleeping around.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath
I wonder if there is some merit to the absurd rules-lawyering that you see in Orthodox Judaism. Clearly, sticking a wire around Brooklyn doesn't make it a 'household' but I can see a more 'spirit of the law' ethos moving the borders of the rules one stage at a time until you're at Reform Judaism and nobody believes in God any more.
Crowstep
3mo ago
RFK Jr. endorses measles, mumps and rubella vaccine
Anti-vaxxer gets mugged by reality? Better late than never.
Crowstep
5mo ago
It's not very efficient. We spend more than the OECD average, and we get fewer doctors, fewer nurses and fewer hospital beds for it. The waiting times are infamously long, and productivity is still worse than it was pre-COVID. Honestly, it might work better with more administrators if that means that GPs don't need to spend time writing actual paper letters to refer their patients to specialists, and similar kinds of bureaucratic nonsense.
Crowstep
5mo ago
Crowstep
6mo ago
Yes I was considering talking about the OBR rules, with their explicit assumptions that all immigrants are going to be as productive as natives and the fact that they don't take long term tax and spending into account. All in all a profound failure of the political class, especially since the Boris-wave will all have been granted indefinite leave to remain before the end of the Starmer government. Permanently impoverishing the country for...nothing.
Crowstep
8mo ago
win every election going forward
They thought that would happen before, it didn't.
African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican. The younger they are and the more they identify as American (as opposed to their ethnic identities) the more likely they are to support the GOP.
The old patterns are breaking down and being replaced by new ones. Men vs women, college-educated vs non-college-educated, married vs unmarried are going to be the relevant demographic criteria of the next few decades, I would predict.
Just like the American Office is a much more popular adaptation of the British original, the Haitians eating cats thing is really just a rip-off of Bangladeshis eating serving cats in their curry houses.
Or maybe it was gypsies eating swans.
Crowstep
22d ago
Holocaust denial censorship is best understood as part and parcel of bans on Nazi symbols. Holocaust deniers aren't disinterested historians searching for truth. They're Jew-haters who are threatened by the idea of a genocide of Jews because it undermines their beliefs that Jews rule the world.
Fortunately, I live in a country which bans neither Holocaust denial (our vibrant Muslim underclass are very grateful) nor Nazi symbolism. The Holocaust deniers have failed to win in the free marketplace of ideas because they are wrong (and motivated by transparent ethnic animosity), not because the government won't let them post on the internet.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I mean, the paper says that obesity isn't caused by a 'broken' lipostat but one that is set too high, which is what I meant by 'broken'. I assume they use 'broken' to refer to things like Prader-Willi Syndrome.
The lipostatic model not only explains why some people become obese whereas others do not, but also allows us to understand why energy-controlled diets do not work
That is precisely what I'm arguing. CICO (as in calorie controlled diet) doesn't work.
The 1970s also didn't see a novel virus or chemical triggering adverse reaction leading to "broken lipostat".
No, but it did see a stratospheric rise in the consumption of vegetable oil, which is what I think caused the obesity epidemic. Seed oils are definitely novel, as is a diet with 5-10x the amount of linoleic acid that humans need.
Crowstep
3mo ago
The plus side of this is that the tax incidence will be borne almost entirely by the manufacturer rather than the consumer.
You can't tax one side of a transaction. If the US government taxes imported widgets by 20%, then the price for the consumer to buy those imported widgets will go up by 20% across the board, because all widget importers have had this cost added and the competitive pressures keeping prices down haven't changed.
Crowstep
5mo ago
A bachelor/spinster tax wouldn't necessarily be a cruel punishment on the ugly, because it would encourage them to couple up with eachother. A punishment on the shy, maybe.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Crowstep
8mo ago
We have not seen "peak woke". We probably won't live long enough to see "peak woke." It's going to just keep getting worse for the rest of our lives.
There's a lot of data suggesting that we really have passed peak woke. 2020 seems to have been the inflection point.
My grandmother used to tell tall tales. She told us that she befriended a cat that followed her to school on the bus, she told us that my aunt was the lovechild of a public figure, she told us that she briefly travelled with circus gypsies as a teenager.
She also told us that she was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, that her future husband fought on a submarine, and that her cousin was on a Japanese POW ship which was sunk by a US strike.
Should I therefore conclude that the Battle of Britain and the Allied war against Japan didn't happen?
The difference here is scale. No matter how many Looney Tunes-esque stories Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is), the fact is that the Holocaust was massive. Europe had millions of Jews, and then it had millions less. There are hundreds of thousands of testimonies, not just from the victims who survived or Nazi soldiers, but also Allied soliders who liberated them. There are mass graves, gas chambers, millions of pages of documentation. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.
This forum is full of contrarians. Contrarianism can be useful. It helps us to question things at are false, but if you don't control the scale, you end up questioning things that are true. You start doubting everything and everyone, and end up believing in massive conspiracies.
A dictator who wanted to establish a Thousand Year Reich deciding to declare war on half the world, thereby dooming his country to defeat in a few short years doesn't make sense. But that is what happened. Death camps may be a waste of resources, but so is invading Russia.
This isn't Ancient Rome. We're not relying on a few parchments from the court propagandists. There are photos, videos, radio recordings, billions of pages of documentation, millions of eyewitnesses, and all of the wonders of modern technology to investigate the recent past. The idea that 'they' (every government, every university, every professional historian, WW2 veterans, both sides of the Cold War, millions of civilian eyewitnesses, right down to chumps like me) is somehow involved in this vast coverup of the truth boggles the mind.
The truth is more prosaic. The Holocaust happened in the way that the historical consensus agreed that it happened. It happened in the same way that every other big event in WW2 happened. It happened because the dictator of Germany, who was always very open about hating Jews, was finally able to enact his will.
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